Lee Waters: Diolch, Ddirprwy Lywydd. Minister, I welcome your comments about the finance Minister being willing to look at the consequentials from the autumn statement to see if there are possibilities of further development in home insulation. The Arbed and Nest schemes have been excellent schemes to tackle carbon emissions and poverty. However, their scale is insufficient to meet the challenge of...
Lee Waters: Cabinet Secretary, amidst the disappointment, we can at least be encouraged by the performance in maths, where Wales saw the biggest increase in the UK and, as you mentioned, of the 71 countries that took part in PISA, only four outperformed us in the rise in maths performance. So, what lessons can we draw from the improvements in maths that can be applied to the other subjects?
Lee Waters: Will you give way?
Lee Waters: Very briefly, can I just ask that, as part of the package that you have negotiated, how much of that is set aside for evaluation to make sure that those lessons are captured?
Lee Waters: Thank you. Given that the case to exit the EU was based, in part, on the importance of returning powers to Parliament, is the Counsel General as perplexed as I am that the UK Government is challenging the view of the court that Parliament should have a role in triggering this? Would he agree that this is a matter for all the Parliaments of the UK, not just the Westminster Parliament? And has...
Lee Waters: 1. Will the Counsel General make a statement on the Welsh Government’s leave to intervene in the Supreme Court case relating to Article 50? OAQ(5)0011(CG)
Lee Waters: I completely agree that it is has multiple benefits, both in terms of food production but also in reducing environmental harm, which also helps some of the poorest in the world by mitigating the impacts of climate change. Now, not only do these precisely applied algorithms mean that less stuff is going in, at a reduced cost to both our farmers and, with fewer harmful chemicals, the...
Lee Waters: Indeed.
Lee Waters: Diolch, Ddirprwy Lywydd. I must confess that the looks on many of my colleagues’ faces when it was announced that we were having a debate on the application of big data in agriculture could be best described as puzzled, but I can assure the Assembly that this is not the result of some esoteric whimsy on behalf of the sponsors. The practical implications of big data in farming are huge....
Lee Waters: Precision agriculture is at the vanguard of this data revolution. It’s a rapidly developing area where information is being applied to food production and land cultivation to dramatically improve productivity and reduce harm to the environment. In arable farming, for example, this approach enables farmers to gather a wealth of real-time information: water and nitrogen levels, air quality,...
Lee Waters: Thank you. At the last meeting of the board of the National Procurement Service, it was revealed that only three local authorities have been willing to share data on how they lease vehicles. What can the Cabinet Secretary do to require data sharing, and once that data is with the NPS, what can he do to make sure the focus isn’t just on cost savings, but on capturing the value to local economies?
Lee Waters: 7. What discussions has the Minister had with the Board of the National Procurement Services on the readiness of local authorities to share procurement practice? OAQ(5)0052(FLG)
Lee Waters: Diolch. Thank you very much. Minister, I recently visited Castell Howell Foods in my constituency, in Cross Hands, a leading independent food wholesaler. They’ve grown enormously over the last 20 years and think they have great scope to grow further, but they are frustrated with the procurement processes for applying to sell their goods to the public sector. What can you do to make sure...
Lee Waters: Indeed. Noted. There are chill winds blowing through our economy, Dirprwy Lywydd, and the situation could well get very challenging in coming years, depending on the terms of trade of Brexit. Hefin’s speech nicely summarises many of the discussions we’ve already been having as backbenchers recently in trying to stimulate new ideas and a consensus for a resilient economic policy that can...
Lee Waters: I thank Hefin David for his kind words and for holding this short debate and for giving me some very short time in that short debate. I do appreciate it.
Lee Waters: It’s worth stressing that there are no plans to devolve the power to set tolls on the Severn bridge to the Assembly. This is therefore a fairly theoretical debate, designed primarily to put pressure on the UK Government. Were powers to be devolved, I think we’d be having a slightly different discussion this afternoon. But as this is a largely philosophical debate, I’d like to use the...
Lee Waters: Diolch, Dai. I heard you call for radical action. I heard your party call for radical action very recently on climate change. So, I find it curious that you are now arguing for a position that will increase traffic volumes by between 12.5 and 25 per cent, which will make climate change harder to tackle.
Lee Waters: Will the Member give way?
Lee Waters: Diolch. The weight of the discussions around increasing the provision of Welsh-medium education—. We know that only around 16 per cent of children are educated through the medium of Welsh, which means that the majority, the overwhelming majority, of schoolchildren in Wales get taught Welsh at some level as a second language. Now, there’s a lot of evidence to show the quality of that in...
Lee Waters: Will you give way?
